This blog is written by a journalist based in Mumbai who writes about cities, the environment, developmental issues, the media, women and many other subjects.The title 'ulti khopdi' is a Hindi phrase referring to someone who likes to look at things from the other side.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Going after the green

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, June 22, 2014

Pocket of rich biodiversity.Photo: Arunangsu Roy Chowdhury

Crimes against women have been constantly in the news. But crimes against nature remain largely unreported.

Given
the current climate, with the Intelligence Bureau claiming that
non-governmental organisations like the crusading international
environmental group Greenpeace, are detrimental to India’s progress, and
with the ubiquitous ‘foreign hand’ making a serendipitous comeback,
such crimes are likely to become invisible, noticed only by those who
have been damned as ‘obstructionist’ or worse still, ‘anti-national’.

As
I tend to identify with that tribe, let me address this column to the
elements that ensure that our physical environment does not become an
endless landscape of roads and buildings, leaving no space for the
unregulated, the wild, the unexpected that only the natural environment,
left inviolate, provides.

A big part of this
unregulated environment is trees. Today, they are in danger. They will
drown as more dams are built, or the height of existing dams is raised.
They will be razed to make way for infrastructure — roads and highways,
airports, electric power stations. They will be stifled and killed by
the concrete pavements surrounding them in our expanding cities. They
will be excavated from our forests to make way for open-pit mines
producing the minerals considered essential for a ‘modern’ India.

The
former environment minister Jairam Ramesh and the current Prime
Minister Narendra Modi both spoke of the need for toilets rather than
temples. Will anyone now say that India needs more forests not freeways?
That even if factories, roads and railways, airports and sea ports are
essential, so is a tree cover that saves the soil, replenishes the
water, provides sustenance to millions of forest dwellers, cleans the
air and absorbs some of the filth and poisons being generated by our
modern lifestyles, poisons that will accumulate in the atmosphere and
ruin the health of future generations.

The new
environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, whose ministry is also supposed
to take care of forests and address climate change, is a man in a
hurry. He wants to clear ‘obstacles’ to progress in the form of pending
environmental clearances. To do that, he wants to change the old
criteria that classified forested areas as ‘violate’ or ‘inviolate’. The
latter category was formulated to ensure that nothing — no project, no
mine, no dam — could disturb certain forested areas.

The
parameters set out to decide whether a forest area is ‘violate’ or
‘inviolate’ are the quality of the forest area, the produce it
generates, its biodiversity, hydrological, social, aesthetic and
economic value. All these are essential. So in what way can this list be
‘rationalised’ or altered by the new minister? Why should these
parameters be changed? The only reason would be to find a way to grant
clearances to projects that will go against these criteria.

Forests
are also about people, not just trees. An estimated 350-400 million
people in 173,000 villages live within forests, or depend on them. That
is not a small number. So if forests are destroyed, to make way for a
mine, a factory, a dam, a power plant, there are people whose lives are
also destroyed. The previous government passed laws protecting their
rights, giving them the power to decide whether a forest area can be
diverted to other uses.

What will happen to these
rights? In the name of ‘progress’ and fast-tracking environmental
clearances, will laws like the Forest Rights Act be revised or negated?
If and when this happens, will the voices of those who have fought for
the rights of forest dwellers, and for the protection of our remaining
forests, be heard?

These are questions that need to
be asked now, not after policies are put in place that facilitate the
destruction of the natural environment and that deprive nature-dependent
communities of their rights. If environmentalists are apprehensive
about the future, they are justified. So far, nothing has been said or
done to assuage their fears.

Despite this, what they
can and must do is document the importance of fighting to preserve the
environment — in the way the TreesIndia Group is doing on the India
Biodiversity Portal (http://treesindia.indiabiodiversity.org/). Spend a
few minutes on this site. It will give you a sense of the wealth that we
have in India and what could disappear without a trace if we don’t
speak up now on behalf of nature.

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My profile

Journalist, columnist, writer based in Mumbai. Author of "Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's largest slum" (Penguin, 2000). Worked with The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express and Himmat Weekly.
Other books include "Whose News? The Media and Women's Issues" edited with Ammu Joseph (published by Sage 1994/2006), "Terror Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out" edited with Ammu Joesph (published by Kali for Women, 2003) and "Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters" (published by Zubaan, 2010).
Regular columns in The Hindu, Sunday Magazine and on The Hoot (www.thehoot.org).